A 78 year old man from Prievidza (a town in the west of Slovakia) has died in hospital a week after being attacked by a stag. Apparently, it was a spontaneous attack as the man tended his orchard – the stag charged and skewered him with its antlers. More can be read here – noviny.sk – Stag Kills Man

Deaths from stag attacks are relatively rare, usually only one every so many years. Most often they’re during rutting season when people approach stags because they’re just standing still and not running away (which is because their brains are addled by rampant hormones). My kids and I were charged by one in the forest several years back and we had to hide behind a tree while it went berserk. 99.99% of the time the stag just flees though.

“I don’t know what the answer is. In time man gets used to almost anything, but the problem seems to be that technology is advancing faster than he can adjust to it. I think it’s time we started applying the brakes, slowing down our greed and slowing down the world.”

Dick Proenneke

Based on the 1968/69 journals of Dick Proenneke and edited/written by Sam Keith, later made into the documentary film “Alone in the Wilderness“, One Man’s Wilderness is simply mind blowing. It’s what many of us dream of doing – but we seriously don’t have the old school skills or determination of the legendary Dick Proenneke who, at 50 years of age, heads to Alaska, builds his own cabin with simple tools and then spends the next 35 years living in tune with nature.

The book is both inspirational and also a frustrating, tantalizing vision of what once was and what is now almost impossible. It’s the “modern” version of Thoreau’s Walden. Every modern book, film and TV series on Alaska started from this.